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College Spotlight

Alternative Spring Break: Students Witness Life After Genocide in the Balkans

Inside a mosque in the war-scarred city of Sarajevo, student Konstantine Lagos learned
something impossible to grasp in a classroom.

“We were coming from the lone synagogue in the city when we heard the
call to prayer at the mosque, and we literally just followed on impulse…I
felt like everything I ever heard or knew about the Islam religion and culture
was just completely shattered,” said Lagos, one of nine students from
the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences at Nova Southeastern University who
traveled to Europe during spring break 2010 as part of the travel-study course:
Genocide in the 20th Century and Beyond.

The 12-day trip, led by Gary Gershman, J.D., Ph.D., associate professor in
the college’s Division of Humanities, took students to the historic cities
of Belgrade, Serbia; Krakow, Poland; and Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, where the tell-tale signs of the civil war are widely visible.
The conflict from 1992 to 1995 between the three main ethnic groups, the Serbs,
Croats, and Muslims, resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against the
Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“We were so curious,” said Lagos, a biology major, recalling how
students approached the mosque with trepidation. “I couldn’t express
the excitement as we entered…Every man around me looked just like me.
Some had fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes, or mohawks and skinny jeans. It
was so surreal but then I had my epiphany. My ignorance was cleared when I realized
something that I’ve known all along. Islam is a religion, a faith. It
has nothing to do with race or skin color. Those 20 minutes of prayer became
a manifestation of everything we learned in class. This was such an incredible
eye-opening experience that I will never forget.”

Such experiences are the goal of the college’s Travel Study Program,
which encourages students to engage, discover, and explore other countries and
cultures. The program encompasses a wide range of international academic and
cultural experiences, providing an opportunity to pursue in-depth topics relevant
to students’ majors, study another culture, or learn another language. Lagos and three other travel-study students, Lauren Butler, Maxwell Hyman, and Calista Siobhan Ming, also were participants in the Undergraduate Honors Program.

For Gershman’s students, the study of genocide was deeply rooted in
the trip abroad. In Sarajevo, the road that once led to the Olympic Village
of the 1984 international games is now lined with cemeteries, filled with the
graves of the war dead. In Belgrade, the class met with Serbs who criticized
the United States because they felt they were unfairly criticized and blamed
for the genocide in Bosnia.

In Poland, students visited Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where about
a million Jews and at least a half a million others were murdered during World
War II.

“To talk about genocide is one thing,” Gershman said. “But
to stand in the middle of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the cold and snow, or to walk
the streets of Sarajevo seeing the scars of the three-year siege, or to sit
in a room with the women of Srebrenica and have them look you in the eye while
they describe the last time they saw their sons before they were taken away
from them by the Serbs and slaughtered…this creates a unique, impactful
educational experience.

Indeed, the experience had a lifelong impact on the students.

Maxwell Hyman, a legal studies major, is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor.
His late grandfather lost 11 members of his family at the Auschwitz death camp.

“Walking from the train depot to the site of the gas chamber was very
momentous,” Hyman said. “I was thinking about my family and how
privileged I am to be alive. If my grandfather had died there, I wouldn’t
be alive today. I keep seeing it in my mind. It was my own ‘march of the
living.’”

One of the most pivotal events was the students’ meeting with the Women
of Srebrenica, an organization based in Sarajevo that is dedicated to finding
the thousands of bodies still missing from the massacre of men in the town of
Srebrenica in July 1995. Some of the women wept as they told their stories.

“One of the women said, ‘the greatest gift in the world is to
be born, live, and die a human being,’” recalled biology major Calista
Siobhan Ming, a freshman who took the course to explore the reasons behind genocide. “The
reason for genocide is not something that is discussed a lot. I have talked
to friends who were interested but had not bothered to read about it. I wanted
to learn a lot more about this. And I learned so much from this trip.”

Business major Freslaine Saint Louis said the experience made her feel like “we
live in a bubble. We hear about [war and genocide], but to see the people and
how they live really changed my mind set. There are people struggling with things
that are so much bigger than what we experience.”

The shared experience forged a bond between the students whose diverse backgrounds
were a touch point for learning from each other. The nine students come from
Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox backgrounds. For each,
the trip provided an acute awareness of the struggle for human rights in the
Balkans, as well as the importance of exploration and engagement with other
people and cultures around the world.

“Learning about the harsh realities of human nature and history forces
you to open your eyes and question what you thought you knew about the world,” said
Anam Ismail, a legal studies major who is Muslim. “Further, genocide truly
encompasses many aspects of academics, namely psychology, history, and the law.
I am currently taking a course in international law. On multiple occasions,
I have quite passionately pointed out examples of genocide, which often leads
to discussions regarding how genocide fits into international law and its various
legal implications. In many ways, the trip has provided me with a canvas, and
everything I learn from here on out will add to it.”

Ismail encouraged fellow classmates to enter the mosque in Sarajevo. She helped
the women properly cover their heads. “I think I helped [dispel] the stereotypes.
They could see what was going on firsthand, and I could answer their questions,” she
said.

“If it wasn’t for Anam, I would not have gone into the mosque,” said
Lauren Watkins, a junior majoring in communications studies. “Our group
was completely diverse. We each brought something to the table. I learned as
much from [fellow students] as I did from anything else on the trip,” said
Watkins, who grew up as a Southern Baptist.

In Sarajevo, the students stayed at a Holiday Inn in the middle of the former “sniper
alley,” called such because of the fighting there, Gershman said. Bullet
holes were still visible in the walls at churches, apartment buildings, and
at the University of Sarajevo, where student Francesca Mardi watched “students
our age walking in and out of the buildings,” seemingly unaffected by
the scars of violence.

“It was weird,” Hyman said, recalling how students ate pizza next
door to an open-air market that was once the target of a deadly bombing. “Here
we are, eating pizza and having a good time” and knowing that others had
died just a few feet away.

“It is as if they want to keep it there, the evidence of war,” said
Lauren Butler, a senior enrolled as a double-major in theatre and psychology. “It’s
like a living monument.”

For Konstantine Lagos, a mother’s tears will always remind him of the trip.

“One of the women of Srebrenica who had lost her son was pouring her
heart out,” Lagos said. “She was trying to express her pain. You
could see the pain in her eyes. When she looked at me, she said she wondered
what her son would look like now.”